Where a 90-day rover ran a 15-year marathon.
Meridiani Planum is a smooth plain near the Martian equator, chosen as the landing site for NASA's Opportunity rover because orbiters detected grey hematite — a mineral that usually forms in water. Opportunity landed here in 2004 and kept working until 2019, driving over 45 km, the longest distance ever traveled on another world.
Claim your plot here →Opportunity was designed for a 90-day mission, yet it explored Meridiani Planum for more than a decade and a half. Within weeks of landing it found tiny spherules nicknamed 'blueberries' — hematite concretions that form in liquid water — providing some of the first ground-truth evidence that Mars was once wet.
The rover crossed the plain from crater to crater, eventually reaching the rim of the 22 km Endeavour Crater and studying ancient clay minerals there. A global dust storm in 2018 blotted out the sun; Opportunity fell silent and was declared lost in February 2019, ending one of the great voyages of exploration.
Opportunity's 45 km is longer than a full 42 km marathon — driven at a top speed of about 5 cm per second.
Built for 90 days, it lasted roughly 5,000 sols — over 55 times its design life.